


Iron-willed compassion

by Perspicacia



Series: Adi Gallia, Master of the Order [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Mace Windu/Adi Gallia, Background Rex/Bo-Katan, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 08:38:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11940426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perspicacia/pseuds/Perspicacia
Summary: The news about the Jedi, Palpatine, Anakin, was already all over the holonet when they left Mandalore, but it was a mess, full of conflicting information.The Jedi Temple was closed off and didn’t accept communications, nobody seemed to know how many Jedi were dead exactly, half the population was asking for Adi Gallia's head and apparently, her former Master went mad and murdered almost everyone she knew since she was a child.





	Iron-willed compassion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PunsBulletsAndPointyThings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunsBulletsAndPointyThings/gifts).



> Many thanks to the very nice and patient aeremaee for beta-ing, finding me a title and giving me so much help!

Ahsoka was on Mandalore when it happened.

The Force must have another plan for her than a stupid death too young, because she was with Rex, an already de-chipped brother, when Order 66 expanded over the galaxy like an oil spill. Not only did Rex not try to kill her, but he saved her life. She had forsaken the Order but she was still a child of the Light, a daughter of the Force. When Jedi started dying all over the Republic the shock hit her hard and she lost her footing on the cliff where they were hidden, playing a deathly hide and seek with the Death Watch.

Rex had the reflexes of an engineered man, sharpened by war: he caught her and held her while she cried and shivered so hard her fangs hurt, without understanding why.

They needed almost two weeks to steal a ship good enough to go all the way to Coruscant without tipping the Death Watch or Maul, and Bo-Katan wasn't exactly pleased with them but they parted allies, if not friends. As great as was Mandalore’s need in this hour, the Jedi Order needed them more, and Rex would not let something like a few nights in Bo-Katan's quarters stop him.

 

The news about the Jedi, Palpatine, _Anakin_ , was already all over the holonet when they left Mandalore, but it was a mess, full of conflicting information.

The Jedi Temple was closed off and didn’t accept communications, nobody seemed to know how many Jedi were dead exactly, half the population was asking for Adi Gallia's head and apparently, her former Master went mad and murdered almost everyone she knew since she was a child.

She had difficulties sleeping and in her dreams, Anakin clenched his fist and her airway closed. She thought she might have gone crazy without Rex. Even meditation didn't really help; the Force itself seemed to mourn its sons and daughters.

She just wanted to go to the Temple. There, she would find the truth. Her dreams lied, the Holonet lied, Skyguy hadn’t, couldn't...

Of course, that would have been too easy. First, there were pirates. Then she and Rex got separated, found each other again, too many ships exploded, she destroyed what she was pretty sure was a priceless artefact worthy of a museum in ancient maze, Hondo offered her a crown when she kicked his gang's ass and Rex a job, and some other things that she was pretty sure she was not supposed to hear on top of that. It seemed the good Captain was really irresistible.

The longer their trip, the stranger the theories that started emerging on the Holonet. The new acting Chancellor, Riyo Chuchi, had appointed Adi Gallia to work with her and it fed the conspiracy theories, that and the fact that no other Jedi had come out of the Temple.

Master Gallia couldn't be the only one alive... Could she?

And finally, Coruscant, still marked by the scars of the last attack, a little more than a month before. When they arrived at the Temple in a battered ship, exhausted and so full of questions, Rex was refused entry. Ahsoka was furious, but the two heavily armed Knights guarding the door of the hangar refused to bulge.

There was fear in their eyes when they looked at him. Later, when she travelled the Temple and the parts that the surviving Jedi had closed, when she felt, in her bones, the terror, the death, she understood those two Knights better.  The survivors occupied floors that had been empty for years, in the most ancient part of the Temple. It reeked of dust, but it was still a lot better than terror and murder.

Master Gallia told her everything, then took her to the place where Master Drallig had stopped Vader with her help. Ahsoka needed Adi Gallia’s shoulders to stand upright, her Force senses assaulted by the traces of what happened here, still potent in the Force. It was him. This malevolence, this hate, this bloodlust, it was him. A warped, twisted version of him, but it was him.

_Anakin._

They didn’t stay long in the hallway where he had died. Force Sensitives would avoid this place for a long time to come. Perhaps it should have been sealed.

“Where did you put him?” she finally asked, hours later. They’d given her a bed, in a room full of Padawans, but she had left them, and went back to Master Gallia, who was busy setting new guards rotations. 

“We have given his body to the Judicials and I don’t know what they did with it. To be honest, it doesn't concern me. My task is to protect the Order and he didn’t die part of it. Perhaps his wife?”

Padmé Amidala… Of course, he went and married her. Ahsoka had understood long ago there was something between them, but marriage? They really didn’t believe in making things simpler for themselves, apparently.

The next morning, she began by visiting Rex in the barracks. The de-chipping was almost over but the brothers didn’t seem happier for it. The atmosphere was morose and they made her list them the names of the Jedi she had seen alive in the Temple. The tenth time she had to answer “I don’t know” when one of them asked her about the survival of a particular Jedi, Rex intervened, asking for them to leave her alone.

He went with her to Senator Amidala’s apartment and that visit was horrible. The poor widow didn’t believe in Anakin’s Fall.

“I sensed it!” barked Ahsoka, the fourth time Padme accused the Jedi of murdering him. It was not really tactful but the despair and the death she had sensed… To deny Anakin’s actions was disrespectful to his victims.

“He snapped and he murdered everybody and he would have killed more if Master Drallig hadn’t sacrificed himself. I don’t know why, I don’t understand why, but this is what happened!”

Senator Amidala refused to see them again for a whole month before her handmaiden finally convinced her and they could come back, babysitting for her when she worked to put her life on track.

The Queen of Naboo had revoked her seat in the Senate when the truth about their wedding had become known, but Padmé didn’t seem ready to go back to her home world and her parents finally came to collect her and the twins. On the traditionalist Naboo, it would impossible for her to work in politics again, but where could she heal better?

Ahsoka was sad to see them go. Sometimes, half asleep, she _Saw_ possibilities, little Luke, dressed as a Jedi, smiling and wearing her braid, but she didn’t think it would come to pass now: Senator Amidala wouldn’t let her son become a Jedi. And after all, she herself was not a Jedi anymore; no Padawan would ever wear her braid.

“But you could,” Said Master Gallia one day. She was running herself ragged and Ahsoka, needing something to do outside of the Temple, had begun to go with her to the Senate. Master Gallia had been hardened by the end of the war but she was still firmly in the Light, wise and strong, and Ahsoka loved basking in her presence and observing her at work. She was not the only one. Naturally, all Jedi had come to rely on her, taking her orders and listening to her as if she was the Master of the Order.

“Every Master and Knight would be happy to finish your training. It would be an honour for the Order to welcome you back to our ranks.”

Ahsoka didn’t answer.

Another Master? Yes, she had come back to the Order. She must still be a Jedi, her pulse still aligned to theirs. But calling another _Master_ , when the fate of Anakin was still a bleeding wound in her heart, a wound that seemed ready to fester? She knew that Ferus Olin, Adi Gallia’s new Padawan, had had another Master before. She knew that he had left the Order, too, and sometimes she wanted to ask for his advice, the only one that had followed the same path as her, left as a Padawan, and come back. She didn't do it. He was older, Anakin’s age, with a husband, and they were definitely in different places in their lives. She didn’t think his experience could be used as an example for her. She didn’t think it could be that easy.

The nights were still difficult. She saw Anakin in her dreams, his eyes yellow and malevolent. Would she one day understand _why_?

Rex helped, her brother in everything but in blood. He had led almost all brothers on Coruscant on a violent strike to Mandalore, crushed the Death Watch brutally and come back, and she had the idea that he was only here for her. They trained—always in the barracks since the clones were still barred from the Temple—they talked, sometimes they fought. They had loved Anakin and they still did, even horrified by his choices and his end.

But Rex couldn’t spend all his life with her just because he believed she was not ready to walk alone. Little by little, brothers were leaving. Now that the new peace seemed more solid every day, they were searching their own path.

“Doesn’t Bo-Katan need your help anymore? I thought you and her…”

“Well, she understands the want to help a vod. She understands you need me more. With Death Watch decapitated, she doesn’t need me to kick Mandalore back into shape. But she said I better be there for the birth or she will castrate me.”

“The birth? Rex!!”

“It was an accident! Don’t judge me like that. I wasn’t supposed to be capable of fathering a child.”

“And you didn’t think to check? Kix could have told you that in ten minutes, perhaps less.”

“Aren’t you a little young to read me the riot act about that?”

“Well, someone has to. What are you still doing here? Even if you and her aren’t serious, you’re supposed to be there for that. I think. I’m pretty sure it’s the protocol.”

Later, when Rex had made her promise eight times that she would comm at the first whisper of trouble and had departed to Mandalore, she went to the Senate. She needed to talk to someone about that future child, and who better than the youngest Chancellor in history, Riyo Chuchi. Riyo that she had knew when the world was easier, and that had always been ready to hear her ideas when Ahsoka came to the Senate with Master Gallia.

Riyo Chuchi was already working hard on the civil rights that the clones deserved, but she was happy to add the necessary parts about their eventual descendants. And she offered her a warm cup of some sort of herbal infusion from her world, and her ear. It was good to speak with someone that wasn’t a brother or a Jedi. Riyo was smart, without compromising on her principles but still capable of compassion.

Ahsoka came back, again and again. She came back when she had questions, she came back when Master Gallia was officially made Master of the Order and she needed to share that joy, she came back when she wanted a few hours hidden in the Chancellor’s private chambers, far away from the Temple, she came back when she had nightmares, she came back when she was bored and ready to help Riyo shape the galaxy… After a time, since Ahoska didn’t like to be without something to do, she started to learn her friend’s language, even if Riyo’s basic was perfect, and they spent hours working close together, late into the night.

One day, a ship touched down in the Temple hangar. Master Kenobi had brought back all the Force Sensitives he had found, some untrained, some lost Jedi, some followers of other Force visions…

He had aged terribly in the two years since their last meeting. His hair was totally white when the last time there had been only grey at his temples, and in his eyes she saw the same sorrow that was in her heart. She flew in his arms and for the first time since she had come back to Coruscant she wept, and she let him sweep her up and take her to his new quarters.

They didn’t talk about Anakin—they weren’t ready—but they shared rations, not willing to go eat in the refectory, and he told her stories of all the places he had seen in his quest for new members of the Order, and for a time everything could have seemed normal, as if Anakin would pass through the door in a few minutes, after a mission without her where he would have left her with her grand-master. That night she slept on his couch and the last thing she remembered was the wool blanket that careful hands laid down on her.

“He seemed fractured,” she would say to Riyo three days later. “Like someone took a blunt object to his soul.”

“Well, in a way, it’s probably exactly that. After all, you were already gone. You had renounced Skywalker already. He hadn’t.”

“I had left the Order, not my Master.”

“Seems to me like you’re in the Order again, and you don’t seem ready to follow your Master’s path. And that’s good.”

“What does that mean?”

“You live in the Temple, you help them rebuild what Skywalker destroyed. Master Gallia consults you when we have a work session together. Have you seen how she reacts to my advisors giving advice when she hadn’t solicited them? You should be proud of that, she believes in you. Perhaps you could build a life here. But you’re not obligated to, if you don’t want it. I can understand waiting for your grand-master, but now? What will you do? Will you live eternally with the Jedi without being one?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m always happy to see you. I’m not saying you have to decide right now. There is no wrong answer. Just different possibilities. And if you leave and want a job, I can find you one on the Pandora delegation, not well paid, but…”

“No. No. I don’t want to be a bother.”

Riyo took her hand. Her hand was slightly warmer than Ahsoka’s, without the saber calluses, but there was strength in it. Her heart beating wildly in her chest, Ahsoka turned her hand until their fingers were entangled.

“You never are,” smiled Riyo.

Ahsoka had stared down assassins, droids, and various Separatists. She had killed and she had almost been killed. She had been hurt, she had been in terrible situations, and she had been a prisoner of war. Once, she had lost her faith in the Order, an Order that had lost its faith in her first. Never had her heart danced in her chest in danger the way it was when Riyo was smiling. In hindsight, she understood some things better, like her friendship with Steela, so different from the one she had shared with her brother. Steela was dead, and Ahsoka would always mourn her in a way, but Riyo was here. Strong Riyo, who shaped the world into a better place. Strong Riyo, who refused to compromise, who paid for the progress of democracy in the reborn Republic in sleepless nights.

Could she have that? Riyo had let her interest be seen, but she would never do more. Not when Ahsoka had been raised in a celibate way of life. The next step would have to be Ahsoka’s. And she could. She could, if she wanted. The Jedi were changing, after all. Even if she went back to their way of life, she could have that. Ferus, Adi’s Padawan, had come to the Temple with his husband. The new Master of the Order herself was in a relationship, and Adi Gallia and Mace Windu seemed to be able to balance the different parts of their life nicely.

Ahsoka went back to the Temple and knelt in one of the small rooms they had reopened, searching answers in meditation. They didn’t come. It would have been too easy. Since the days of death for so many of its children the Force had been muddied by grief and even without the dark shadow Sidious’ presence had cast on it, finding peace in it was complicated.

Still, it was its own answer, in a way. With questions in her mind, her first reflex had been to kneel and meditate. She went down the hallways, observing the life of the Temple. There were more children than adults, now, even with the non-trained Force Sensitives that Obi-Wan had brought back, and there was always work to be done and she set her quest aside for a moment to offer another pair of hands where Mace Windu was teaching the first steps of Force healing to Iniates. She liked Master Windu and since the end of the war he was smiling more, his prosthetic hands gentle when he corrected young ones’ postures where they tried to heal for the first time, training with arthritis of older Masters.

Later that day, she found her grand-Master helping with the baths of the younger ones. He was only wearing his inner tunic, probably in an effort to protect the rest of his uniform and was soaked, almost from head to toe.

“Which one of you is supposed to get wet and soapy?” she asked, amused, before coming to his aid. Obi-Wan had begun healing, but it was slow, so slow. She still slept on his couch and sometimes she feared she would wake up one morning to find only a pile of clothes in the bed where he was supposed to be.

When all children were sleeping, when they had shared dinner with the other adults, she followed him to one of the gardens, and there she asked him to finish her training. He went so white she thought for an instant he would faint, and then he ran, there in an instant and gone the second after and just the sound of his panicked refusal in the air.

Slightly vexing, as she would confess to Riyo.

“But I understand. His last Padawan…” She didn’t finish and after a second of hesitation, Riyo put her arm around her shoulder.

“Perhaps it would be easier to ask another. Perhaps it would be nicer, too,” the young Chancellor said. She was wearing some sort of pyjamas but had been working when Ahsoka had come, work that she had set aside for her, and for a second the young Tortuga asked herself if she wasn’t unnecessary trouble in her friend’s life. The youngest Chancellor ever, the one that was supposed to be the guiding hand to restore the democracy in the Republic, had a workload enough for four people, even with all her aids, but she always made time for her.

“I don’t want another, and I think I could be good for him. That it could help him heal. Why are you smiling like that?”

“Because you’re a good person. Because your first reflex was not ‘Will he be good for me?’ but ‘Will I be good for him?’. I don’t know if it’s healthy, but it’s telling about your heart.”

Ahsoka felt herself flush.

“Riyo?”

“Hmmm?”

“May I kiss you?”

And just like that, it was the most natural thing in the world. Riyo’s skin was warmer, her scent familiar but suddenly much more present. Her lips were agile, not like Ashoka’s hesitant ones, and she radiated comfort, passion and another emotion that Ahsoka wasn’t ready to name.

As first kisses went, Ahsoka thought that one to be a good one, even if she’d had no others to compare.

Later in the night, after the first make-out session of her life, she tracked down Obi-Wan in the Temple. He was kneeling on the floor in the dark, in the exact place where Anakin had died as Darth Vader.

It was really like him to torture himself like that, and there was something frail in his silhouette. She felt her heart jump in her chest. She refused to lose him, too. She had spoken with Adi Gallia and Mace Windu about him, with Master Tii and Master Unduli, too. Obi-Wan wasn’t lacking friends. Cody. Cody had still not seen his ancient General, but he had spoken with Ahsoka a few times. Obi-Wan wouldn’t lack friends, if he could, for a second, let go of his guilt and see the world around him.

“He was worse before his travels,” Master Gallia had confessed, and in her eyes Ahsoka had seen her fear for Obi-Wan; fear that one day he would let himself fade as a punishment for raising Darth Vader.

“I almost didn’t recognize him when he came to Bellassa to fetch me,” Ferus Olin had said, Adi Gallia’s new Padawan, who had been the Padawan of one of Obi-Wan’s childhood friends before.

She kneeled, facing him, their knees touching, and joined him in his meditation. When they opened their eyes an hour later they were crying. It felt cleansing.

Obi-Wan opened his mouth, closed it again, cleared his throat and then asked, his voice full of tears: “Would you do me the honour of becoming my Padawan to finish your training?” and she fell in his arms without a word.

 

 


End file.
